The Tracker Strikes B(l)ack : The Uses of ‘Black Tracker’ in Australian Film
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
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| Description | The talk will introduce one of the most iconic figures of recent Australian film, the Black Tracker, whose shadowy presence looms large in Australian imagination as a recurrent symbol of colonial history. While the earlier representations depicted these trackers as guides to white explorers and later as sinister members of Native Police, at the turn of the 21st century the trope of Black Tracker has been appropriated to signify more ambivalent meanings, intervening into larger debates about national identity, racial politics, and settler-Indigenous Reconciliation. I will discuss two well-known and critically acclaimed films, The Tracker (2002, dir. Rolf de Heer) and One Night the Moon (2001, dir. Rachel Perkins), to demonstrate how the figure of the Black Tracker is employed to comment on national spatial anxieties and to challenge settler belonging. |
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